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But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and
all that the better sort of man may reasonably remember?
All these, the one [the lower man] retains with emotion, the
authentic man passively: for the experience, certainly, was first
felt in that lower phase from which, however, the best of such
impressions pass over to the graver soul in the degree in which
the two are in communication.
The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the
activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is
itself of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are
better from the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of
the higher.
The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy
forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower: for
one reason, there is always the possibility that the very
excellence of the lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending
to keep it down by sheer force of vitality. In any case the more
urgent the intention towards the Supreme, the more extensive will
be the soul's forgetfulness, unless indeed, when the entire
living has, even here, been such that memory has nothing but the
noblest to deal with: in this world itself, all is best when
human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore, it must be
with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that the
good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity; it seeks to
escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it
free from entanglement, light-footed, self-conducted. Thus it is
that even in this world the soul which has the desire of the
other is putting away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign
to that order. It brings there very little of what it has
gathered here; as long as it is in the heavenly regions only, it
will have more than it can retain.
The Hercules of the heavenly regions would still tell of his
feats: but there is the other man to whom all of that is trivial;
he has been translated to a holier place; he has won his way to
the Intellectual Realm; he is more than Hercules, proven in the
combats in which the combatants are the wise.
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